Today, the new Star Trek film has seen its official premiere here in The Netherlands tonight, and in honour of that, I figured an article on Space.com about the possibility of faster-than-light travel would make a good fit on OSNews. The article is quite technical, so bear with me on this one. I hope I get everything right.
The general idea behind the warp drive propulsion as used in the Star Trek universe is that the space ship itself isn’t moving – space-time around it is moving. Elementary knowledge for Trekkies, but obviously still science fiction mumbo jumbo nonsense. Right…?
Well, not exactly, according to some scientists and physicists over at NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project. According to some models, space-time expanded faster than light speed during a very short period right after the big bang. “If it could do it for the Big Bang, why not for our space drives?” said Marc Millis, former head of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project.
This strictly theoretical method of propulsion requires a bit of insight into Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. In that theory, any concentration of mass or energy warps the space-time around it. This is actually the basic premise of gravity: larger masses create bigger curvatures in space- time than smaller objects, so that the latter simply fall towards the former. You can replicate this behaviour on a trampoline. If you place a large lead ball in one position, and a smaller one further away, the smaller one will roll towards the larger ball.
“If we find some way to alter the properties of space-time in an imbalanced fashion, so behind the spacecraft it’s doing one thing and in front of it it’s doing something else, will then space-time push on the craft and move it?” Millis said. This theory isn’t new, and was already proposed by Miguel Alcubierre, in his 1994 paper “The Warp Drive: Hyper-fast travel within general relativity“. Endlessly fascinating.
In the lab, several experiments already seem to indicate possible signatures of moving space-time, but the biggest problem is that of energy: we really need lots of it. Some experts believe dark energy might give the answer here.
So, we’re still far away from FTL propulsion, but we are making more and more very small and tiny steps towards it. “We still don’t even know if those things are possible or impossible, but at least we’ve progressed far enough to where there are things that we can actually research to chip away at the unknowns,” Millis told Space.com, “Even if they turn out to be impossible, by asking these questions, we’re likely to discover things that otherwise we might overlook.”
Good times, people, good times. I want my own Serenity. With Kaylee.
Nitpicking I know, but technically this isn’t FTL travel. Nothing can travel FTL. Warping space just brings two points closer so you don’t have to travel faster than light.
I don’t think it is, exactly, bending space around two points in this scenario… I think it is more along the lines of using the “pressure” of “space” to push around something contained in a sort of mis-shaped “bubble”.
That’s about as plebeian a description of it as I can muster.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I have always understood warp drive in Star Trek to be something like what happened in Childhood’s End. If I remember correctly, a few humans traveled at near light-speed to the Overlords’ home planet which was many light years away. As the spaceship speed up, time passed much more quickly than time on Earth. To the people on the spaceship, only a few weeks had passed round-trip, whereas on the earth, something like 80 years had passed. Obviously, in Star Trek the difference in time would not be nearly as substantial.
This is different from the whole “space folding” idea, which I understood best in the children’s book A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. In this example, space is folded so that the jump between two points is instantaneous. There was a whole ‘ant on a string’ explanation that was given to visually explain the effect.
Maybe the whole Star Trek warp speed idea is a hybrid of both? Disregarding the obvious of course, that warp drive is only meant to work as a plot device, with the ship being just as fast and powerful as is needed for the good guys to win (or as slow and powerless as is needed to make the episode last an hour).
Edited 2009-05-07 23:47 UTC
No… warp drive allows them to travel outside of time and space… they maintain “normal” space-time in the vessel because (as another poster mentioned) they are not REALLY breaking the light barrier.
NOW… They ARE limited to .25 SOL via their impulse drive which might be capable of reaching greater than .50 SOL… but the time dilation becomes a problem. So (theoretically) “full impulse” is only .25 the speed of light.
Warp drive (in Star Trek) basically generates a force that pushes space back away from the ship in a bubble, and by changing the shape of the bubble they can change the amount of “force” (for lack of a better term) being exerted by space on the bubble. It’s the same idea as pinching a wet watermelon seed… because of its shape, it shoots out of your fingertips. The bubble isn’t exactly a bubble as you or I would define it, but waves of warped space (again I think as someone mentioned) that sort of surround the ship, separating space outside from the space inside (which is why in effect the ship is not moving through space-time, yet it is.)
That is “simple” special relativity, nothing to do with general relativity.
See the twins “though” experiment. This happens everyday. Since particles travelling around the galaxies have a slow wall clock, they disintegrate in what appears for us to be many thousand years, thus allowing them to travel around the galaxies. But when they enter our atmosphere they slow down, their time accelerate back to our “normal” time, and disintegrate in our atmosphere…
Actually tachyons travel faster than light. Also light speed can vary, so… nitpicking it… it is relatively easy to travel faster than light… speaking relative that is… (last phrase copyright Rimmer from Red Dwarf).
Other than that, what is the definition of “faster than light travel”?
No matter the technique, if I get from point A to B faster than a beam of light can… I’m travelling faster than the speed of light. Whether I’m using space-time bubbles or not.
“Tachyons” aren’t real. I can’t tell if you where saying that some entity called a Tachyon routinely moves faster than the speed of lite in the real world – which is false – or if Tachyons travel faster-than-light in Star Trek. Fun fact: if a Tachyon existed in the real world, it would be carrying an infinite amount of (kinetic) energy, and would therefore be completely impossible to stop. It would also be doing any number of odd, insane things. The laws of physics do not work very well when you start talking about wandering about faster than the speed-of-light-in-a-vacuum.
In the real world, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, period. Your point about the speed of light lowering in a medium is well taken, tho: light does travel more slowly through a medium, and it is possible to beat a light-pulse through a medium, in certain scenarios.
beating light which travelling through a medium is very usual.
You just have to put some beta-emitting material into water. Beta radiation consists of electrons of a certain (high) speed, which is higher than the speed of light trough water.
Tachyons are a hypothetical particle predicted by super symmetry. While super symmetry is useful as an attempt to describe what the universe was like during it’s first microseconds of existence as well as trying to unite gravity with the other forces (weak, strong, electromagnetic), the fact that it predicts a faster-than-light particle is viewed as one of it’s major flaws.
No, it doesn’t. the speed of light is constant, no matter your frame of reference. If you travel at 99% the speed of light, and shoot a beam of light in front of you, it travels away from you at ~300k km/sec relative to your speed. Aim backwards, it travels away from you at ~300k km/sec. Those two beams will arrive at stationary individuals at ~300k km/sec. This happens because, as you approach the speed of light, you increase in mass, your large mass gives you a powerful gravity field, and time slows down in powerful gravity fields.
the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant.
light travelling through other materials (such as water) goes slower, allowing other particles that aren’t slowed – neutrinos, i think don’t slow in water – to go ‘faster than light’, at least for a time.
In this idea, it would actually be ftl traveling, as it is not supposed to warp the whole spacetime construct between you and your target point, but to move a bubble of spacetime at ftl speed.
The older “tunneling” idea does not look feasible as it would require an infinite amount of energy as opposed to just an hardly imaginable huge amount of energy.
> I want my own Serenity. With Kaylee.
Who in his/her right mind doesn’t?
strait women and gay men
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/trekkies_bash_new_star_trek_f…
LOVE the Onion.
Thanks for that!
Is it just me or did anyone else read the title completely incorrectly due to the double negatives?
Haha, it wasn’t just you. At first I thought it said that it WAS impossible, and I wondered why on earth that would make a headline on OSNews. Then I read closer.
One of the most interesting theories I’ve come across in my short time.
It has very little technical content, just a bit of speculation.
In any case, even with tricky physics you can’t get FTL travel without time travel, because of the connection between space and time in special relativity.
Dunno about that. Every time I have something spicey I seem to be able to produce enough energy pushing out #2’s to power a warp drive.
The idea outlined (and i agree it isn’t much) would probably avert relativistic effects, since there is no movement within spacetime as the idea is to move a part of spacetime itself.
Any time you beat light-pulse somewhere (through a vacuum), you will have traveled in time. What clever trick you used to beat the light pulse does not change the fact that you have traveled between two events faster than a pulse of light could, which is an entirely sufficient fact to establish that you have potentially traveled in time.
Potentially because not everyone will agree about whether you have traveled in time or not: if it is not possible for a light-pulse to travel between two events – like if they are happening a light year apart, but only a second apart in time – then not all observers will agree on what order the events happen in (or, really, how far apart in time they’re happening). Some people would say you arrived a long time before you left, others might say you took your sweet time making the trip.
I’m not a physicist, but it *sounds* like parent is confusing the fact that it takes a long time for light to get around with actual time travel.
Yeah, if you told the guys at Hubble to watch Andromeda because something cool was going to happen, then instantly teleported there and as soon as you got there you turned on a massive lamp and pointed it at Earth, they aren’t going to see it because the light is still travelling. Afaik, that doesn’t mean you arrive at an earlier time than you left. But relativity is complicated and I don’t think about it unless cool (mostly Star Trek related) articles like this one come along.
More generally (not just in reply to parent), I think it’s hilarious how every commenter on this article thinks they know their shit, and each post differs so broadly. Yup, each person thinks they know exactly how things are, which clearly shows that they don’t, because physics is a constantly changing field. Yeah, I’m sure many of you studied physics intensely at some point but that doesn’t mean you get a lifetime license to think you’re right about it. Throw some disclaimers in there so you don’t look like asses.
That being said, I’ll be the first to say, I am totally not a physicist.
Oh, and wtf Thom you basically just rewrote the article… and the article wasn’t technical in any sense of the word either so it’s not like you were simplifying or something (it’s almost word for word…). Plus it’s listed as a link article despite the fact there’s a body beneath it.
Also, I don’t think Star Trek introduced the space/time-moving bubble idea. That wasn’t in the original article, and I’m pretty sure Thom made that up. If I remember correctly, travelling at ‘warp speed’ is the act of shifting the ship into ‘subspace’ so that relativity can be avoided. But, heh, IANAT (I am not a Trekkie), at least by the dictionary definition.
Where did I claim Star Trek came up with it? I just used it “as an example of”.
I used to read New Scientist back in the day which loved any story about warp drive physics.
One theorist calculated the amount of energy it would take to warp space time to the necessary extent to move the enterprise (TOS). He determined it would take more energy than existed in the universe, even if you took all the other matter and turned it into energy ( via e=mc^2 naturally).
Then there was a follow up a few months later where another one proposed the concept of negative energy as a solution. So you could warp space effectively if you only had such a thing as negative energy.
Then I believe I remember someone else showed that negative energy couldn’t exist for some reason or another.
So basically, the answer is a big maybe. We’re so far away from actually doing any of it, it might as well be magic to us. I’ve already advised my friends working on the LHC to look out for negative energy ( they sort of just laughed ).
🙂
Who knows what awaits to be discovered!
Make it so number 1
Learn french my dear.
Seriously.. I L-O-V-E this topic…
First, to determine if you have faster than light travel, you must determine how to define that speed. Yes, we have a mph figure – but what about perspective?
If I defined faster-than-light (FTL) travel as based upon the perspective of the immobile starting point – outside the space bubble – then FTL *IS* possible [theoretically / mathematically].
If I were to define this as propelling matter in space to FTL speeds, then no – it is not possible.
Another item which must be understood is time dilation. In the space-bubble scenario time is being moved with the space which contains the vessel – there would be no time dilation from any perspective.
In the second case, there would be a time dilation for those traveling. The closer you get to the speed of light, the closer you are to the speed of time itself – so time, relative to the origin, has slowed ( time being the delta between speed of travel and the speed of time itself – which will almost always be the speed of light ). So you feel like you ‘flew’ for 8 weeks, but your grand children are starting retirement.
–
Remember: when you move a space & time bubble you will also displace the space and time around that bubble – though it will be nearly impossible to notice if you’re in that altered space/time.
Also, I don’t think space-time itself is compressed around the bubble, it is merely a displacement. There is a ‘hole’ at the origin, a ‘bubble’ at the destination, and ‘bump’ on the route. Our concerns would rest with the origin and the destination displacements, though it should be possible to setup ‘swaps’ so that travel is accomplished via two origins simultaneously.
In this manner we may well be able to ‘fly’ right through a planet with no concerns what-so-ever beyond suddenly, accidentally, exiting or collapsing the bubble.
Of course, our speed – from our perspective on the ship – would be 0. You don’t need to move within the space you are moving, though you may want to get your rockets online to travel the final jaunt from your destination point. I still think looking outward would look something like how it appears on Star Trek, but I haven’t really put much thought into that.
Oh well, I need to watch something while I wait for the Windows 7 RC to finish downloading…
–The loon
EDIT: how do I *ALWAYS* type the wrong word somewhere and NOT catch it when I preview??
Edited 2009-05-08 07:12 UTC
This article wasnt hard to grasp. I actually wish there was more in-depth articles here on osnews!
Jewel! Her name is Jewel, Nathan, err, Thom
http://xkcd.org/579/
Edit: forgot obligatory XKCD link
Edited 2009-05-08 07:58 UTC
I think Prof Farnsworth FTL drive was rather unique and an interesting take on the whole space travel. Instead of actually moving the ship, the drive moved the universe around it.
Unless you change this first, what will FTL or warp drives bring? We’ll just end up shunting human ignorance around the universe. I am all for technological change and advancement but let’s start with our own minds and souls here on Earth, first.
The universe is a big place. It can handle it… 🙂
The article doesn’t really give us much information because you can’t just warp space time and go from A to B in the way they’re saying there. You need a lot of energy to do that, and the further apart things are and the more space and time you have to warp then it is reasonable to assume that the energy requirements will go up spectacularly.
What you would need is a light speed drive that you could use when you’re in normal space. ‘Impulse engines’ in other words. You would then use your warp drive to warp space/time so that in your own space/time bubble point A and point B are far closer together and then you would use your light speed drive in your own space/time to get there within a reasonable amount of time, dramatically reducing energy requirements of warping. Neat. To everyone else you would apparently be going faster than light.
It gets neater, because the transporter technology in Star Trek is almost certainly not feasible as it is. Disassembling crap and putting it back together? No thanks. However, you’ll only be using it over short distances so you could use that very same warp capability to transport people and items safely, apparently instantaneously.
Our current understand of Warp Drive is pretty much at the same stage as our understanding of airplanes and helicopters was in the 17 or 18 hundreds.
As that time (1800s and earlier) we thought about being able to fly but had no idea how to create an engine, or the fuel it would use, to propel something fast enough to fly. Plus we didn’t know enough about airfoils either.
Only when several things came together, including how to control the airfoil on a wing, were humans finally able to create an airplane plus the engine that used a fuel with enough power to sustain flight.
We are still basically trying to use wood or coal fires to think about warp flight with no understand yet of what kind of actual “engine” or fuel we would need to build something to make warp drive possible.
Quantum entanglement and all it’s related properties were unheard of a couple of decades ago. Now we have access to spooky effects at a distance. Teleportation is possible now with single photons and now atoms, so do freak out when your children or grand children beam to school.
As for FTL, if you warp space, you’re not really “traveling” FTL, not in local space. You can’t compare speed from different mediums (spaces), that’s cheating. I can run faster than your car if it’s at the bottom of a lake, that doesn’t allow me to honestly claim to be faster than a car. Or if I run with a long treadmill I still won’t make the olympics. If I turn on a flashlight on the ship, the photons will zip right past me.
I am just a layman.
However, I am increasingly skeptical that we’ll ever find a way to send anything other than electromagnetic waves (as opposed to actual particles) at faster than light speeds. I think we’re going about this wrong. Sure, if you download Celestia and move the camera around at speeds less than c, it sinks in how very far away we are from anything, and a lot of us geeks want to see another frontier. We aren’t going to get there by assuming anything earthlike about space, or what can live there!
We have a lifespan of 70-80 years, and we haven’t a real clue how we’d go faster than maybe 1/10th the speed of light. We aren’t going to pile into a vehicle and take a drive and ask “are we there yet” the whole way. Suspended animation is the closest thing I can imagine to that on our list of conceivable options. Beyond that, I really think we need to evolve an actual biosphere that can live inside environs we can actually build in space. If we want to make the trip, we’re going to have to engineer the human body for it, in terms of longevity and radiation resistance. Our bodies just aren’t ready to live out there.
The alternative is to leave space to the probes, as capable and smart as we can make them, and accept that we belong right here on Earth where our genetic ancestors have evolved to live in for over a billion years.